A Diary of Scattered Thoughts

[Maximus Dominus]

I decided to do a Google search for the term Alamaze. This is a screenshot of the results:

   


Your own search results may differ, if you try it on your end. But this is what I saw, and I added the big numbers, for ease and quickness of identification.

And here's a screenshot that I took of a page from the forum's admin control panel:

   


Changing the Board Name and/or the Homepage Name of the forum from kingdomsofarcania to something with the word Alamaze in it (i.e: Alamaze, Alamaze Forum, etc.) might improve the Alamaze's forum's placement in the search engine results.

Link #2, above, leads to the Alamaze Community page, which is actually a static website page. The actual Alamaze community is the Alamaze forum and its users who gather there to discuss the game.

   

[Maximus Dominus]

Brekk recently made mention of the following in another thread:

Now its time to create a beginners rulebook.

SOURCE: https://kingdomsofarcania.net/forum/show...1#pid85181


Rulebooks are fine and dandy, and they have their place in the overall scheme of things. At their most basic level, though, rulebooks are one of numerous different things that seek a common purpose.

The common purpose, of course, is to make the game more intuitive.

Alamaze has the Alamaze Online Order System. It is what's known as the Game Interface for Alamaze. A rulebook is an interface, also. Ideally, rulebooks would not be necessary, but rulebooks are, in essence, a roundabout way of explaining (and hopefully, clarifying in the process), by way of reading what it has to say.

Rulebooks, however, are secondary interfaces that function, hopefully, in support of the primary interface, which for Alamaze is the Alamaze Online Order System. The more that intuitiveness is crafted and designed into the primary interface, the less reliant that players, especially newcomers who lack the advantages of familiarity and experience, have to become upon rulebooks and other secondary interfaces.

In a perfect world, all players (including newcomers who lack any experience, at all, with all of a given game's interfaces) would automatically and instinctively just know what to do - without questions, without confusion, without uncertainty.

But who likes to have to read a bunch of dry, boring old rules, just to try their hand at a game? There likely are such individuals out there. Yet, it is doubtful that such individuals comprise the vast majority of gamers in the world, today.

Now, when I try my hand at playing a new game, not only do I not want to have to read a bunch of rules which explain things, that's the very last thing that I want. But if a newcomer to Alaqmaze doesn't want to read the almost 300 page rulebook, then how can they ever hope to even begin to understand how to play Alamaze even on a most basic level, much less ever hope to master the details and nuances that make Alamaze what it is?

That an individual does not want to read hundreds of pages of rules does not mean that said individual is opposed to learning how to play the game.  Forcing newcomers to read countless pages of rules can be a shaky foundation to build the growth of the Alamaze player base upon. Imagine sitting down at a feast, and having to force yourself to eat 293 different courses? The current 4th Cycle Alamaze rulebook has 293 pages just waiting on newcomers to consume them. There is an old saying, Rome wasn't built in a day.

Alamaze, by design, is a very complex game. It's not something that most who try it will master in a day. Heck, just reading the rulebook in a single day all the way through will likely never be accomplished by the vast majority of people who are inclined to give Alamaze a try. If they don't know if they will like Alamaze, then why would most people considering giving Alamaze a try want to invest the time, energy, and effort to read almost 300 pages of rules? And even if they did, that doesn't mean that they will remember what they read. Reading isn't the same thing as retention, after all. How easy is it to get lost in 293 pages of rules?

A rulebook is an interface in written form. Mentoring in Alamaze by experienced players is another form of interface. Here, it is another human being who is the interface. Mentoring might take written form, or it might take spoken form. It might be augmented by audio chat or video chat or talking over the phone, between mentor and mentee. However, rulebooks and mentors do not hold a monopoly upon the learning process. Some human beings prefer the self-taught route done at their own pace. Some find mentors and/or rulebooks distracting. Which is more important? To read a rulebook, or to undergo a mentoring process, or to retain the information necessary to inculcate newcomers to Alamaze with a sufficient degree of knowledge and understanding on how to issue turn orders and gradually improve their playing skills and understanding?

Human beings as a species are a rather ingenious bunch. Not all individuals learn the same thing the same way, nor at the same pace. That's just an undeniable fact. So, why waste people's time by trying to stick round pegs into square holes?

Not all rulebooks are equal. Some tend to invariably end up being better and more effective than others of their ilk. The same holds true with mentoring and mentoring processes. The actual path that newcomers to Alamaze take to grasp how to play Alamaze and issue turn orders for it is vastly less important than that they get to where it is that they are waning to go. We are fortunate, actually, that multiple different paths to learning exist, rather than just one or two.

Reading a really length rulebook is not a Lowest Common Denominator approach. How do you create a shorter, smoother path to enable the newcomer to Alamaze to get to where they want to go? It might behoove the Alamaze player community and the Alamaze powers that be to rethink the processes that underlie the mission of growing the size of the Alamaze player base.

Though it may at first seem counterintuitive, what if I were to tell you that explanations are not always the quickest and easiest way to "explain" things?

[Maximus Dominus]

Yesterday, I took a screenshot of the games of Alamaze that were forming.

   


Do you see the problem with it.? The way that this list scrolls, when you're on the Alamaze Game Queue page, wither the top of the list of players signed up gets cut off, or the bottom of it gets cut off. This is a visually problematic dilemma - if one wants to use a screenshot of all of the games forming, once a relatively small number of player slots in multiple games get spoken for.

The game queue info needs to publish to an image format to a web page location, somewhere, in order to facilitate using the list of players signed up and the games forming as visual temptation in a form which can be easily shared (aka a jpg file).

Just imagine of there were a dozen games of Alamaze forming, and many of them were approaching being full. In its current form, you would be limited in what you could screen capture. Normally, I can just select a scroll option, and take a complete screen shot of an entire webpage, even fairly lengthy ones. Because the Alamaze Game Queue portion with the players listed scrolls within that page, I couldn't get a full screen capture of that info. Two of the players on the bottom game forming got cut off. This isn't good.

[Wookie Panz]

Yesterday, I took a screenshot of the games of Alamaze that were forming.




Do you see the problem with it.? The way that this list scrolls, when you're on the Alamaze Game Queue page, wither the top of the list of players signed up gets cut off, or the bottom of it gets cut off. This is a visually problematic dilemma - if one wants to use a screenshot of all of the games forming, once a relatively small number of player slots in multiple games get spoken for.

The game queue info needs to publish to an image format to a web page location, somewhere, in order to facilitate using the list of players signed up and the games forming as visual temptation in a form which can be easily shared (aka a jpg file).

Just imagine of there were a dozen games of Alamaze forming, and many of them were approaching being full. In its current form, you would be limited in what you could screen capture. Normally, I can just select a scroll option, and take a complete screen shot of an entire webpage, even fairly lengthy ones. Because the Alamaze Game Queue portion with the players listed scrolls within that page, I couldn't get a full screen capture of that info. Two of the players on the bottom game forming got cut off. This isn't good.

Were the two that got cut off the Dwarves DW and Halflings HA?

[Maximus Dominus]

Were the two that got cut off the Dwarves DW and Halflings HA?

Nope. They were the Deathknights (Strongwill) and the Atlanteans (Rellgar).

[Maximus Dominus]

Currently, newcomers can join a new game of Alamaze, without the system asking them for an e-mail address. The system then lists them under the name of Nobody.

Without their e-mail address, how will the system send them a notification e-mail, when their game starts?

Basically, it is possible to join new games of Alamaze, without creating a new player account, first.

This is inherently problematic.

   

[Maximus Dominus]

As a long term sort of thing, and not as an immediate priority of any sort, something that I, personally, would consider to be an item of interest would be to have two pieces of information preserved in a sort of Valhalla-eseque manner, or a record kept (auto-posted by the system, perhaps), of:

1. All of the players who start every game of Alamaze going forward.

. . . and . . .

2. A way to see what players are currently remaining playing in every game that is currently ongoing. This one, especially, would allow players currently playing Alamaze to have an idea of how many players are actually playing Alamaze, at any given moment. Maybe a button or a link that one could click on, and if there were, say, 7 games of Alamaze currently ongoing, the anyone could click on that link or button, and the system would generate on the fly a list of who all is still in each ongoing game. Alternative, perhaps the system could generate such a list once a day, or every so often.

Life tends to generate more life, and being able to see who all is playing, and how many are playing, at any given time, would be a visually persuasive way to demonstrate that Alamaze has life in it. What you don't see is often the most persuasive thing that you see.

   

   

[Maximus Dominus]

The more work that I do to try and instill order into the chaos of this newest incarnation of the Alamaze forum, the more that there remains to be done. Chaos never sleeps!

A reorganization of the forum index page is well under way. This is most noticeable at the top of the forum. Links have been revised or eliminated, and new links have been added. That big, beautiful banner image in the header looks really nice, and it packs far more visual punch than that much smaller version of the much bigger one that now dominates the visual landscape of forum visitors' eyes.

We've got what we feel to be an Easy Process To Get Started Playing Alamaze in place, now. Compared to the old Alamaze forum that existed under the previous ownership, this new version looks a lot better, and it works a lot better. And for those very reasons, usage of the forum by registered forum users has been on the increase, compared to what it used to be, when the old forum needed upgraded (but had been neglected and various things about it didn't work right).

That said, the forum still needs work. Major work! Dwarves creating Khazad-dûm level of work, if you want to know the truth about it. What to keep? What to dump? Where to put it? How to label it? Work, work, work!

In essence, how to organize it all, with the end result hopefully being, in due time, a much smooth and easier-to-use experience. To get to that point, though, requires a rather lengthy journey. The nooks and crannies of the mountains of forum postings that have piled atop one another over the years have to visited. The Mithril (the most valuable and worthwhile forum postings to preserve and to showcase) does not mine itself, you know.

Any volunteers?

[Maximus Dominus]

One thing that Alamaze needs is a Player Checklist.

I say that, because as I was pondering Game 5703, this morning, it dawned on me that a handy, dandy, not-over-complicated player checklist could be a useful tool for me to monitor my scattered attempts to master basic fundamentals of playing Alamaze.

There's a lot of documentation for Alamaze already in written form. That's beside the point, though.  I'm currently in three games of Alamaze, and one tutorial game. I didn't join a new tutorial game, recently, to learn how to play Alamaze. Rather, I wanted to see what my own reaction to it was.

I don't recommend the Alamaze tutorial to anyone. Talk about a god-awful boring and confusing experience! Skip right past that tutorial crap, which is like a small paper plate with a few dinner mints on it, and head straight for the feast that the main/full game of Alamaze has waiting on you. And don't fret and worry about whether you are gonna win or lose (you're definitely gonna lose), and instead use your first few games of Alamaze to focus upon learning how to master the basics of the interface and the game, itself. The Alamaze tutorial needs to be repurposed for a more productive use. You will never grow the Alamaze player base relying on that archaic and clumsy mechanism.

As of yet, I have not attempted to undertake the crafting of an Alamaze Checklist. So, I don't have one that I can just post and share with others, right at this moment in time. It's probably something that any number of different experienced Alamaze players could create on their own. If fact, with numerous experienced players were to create their own version of what an Alamaze Checklist should look like, we could then take them all, and refine and distill them down into one better version for the benefit of all future newcomers to Alamaze.

Right now, I remain largely ignorant of how to effectively issue orders pertaining to groups and patrols. People talk about patrols all the time (or at least, they use to, on the old Alamaze forum), and the rulebook even talks about it. Yet, here I am, all this time later, and I still am moving military groups around to scout for population centers. Not a single patrol have I made use of in games 5684, 5693, and 5703, thus far. Yet, I'm hiring and training agents like crazy!

People do not want to read a bunch of crap (not usually, though there may be the occasional exception that wanders in, now and again). What they want is to just jump right in and play. Documentation frequently becomes delay incarnate, for newcomers trying to check out a game that they became aware of. Granted, document does have a place in the overall grand scheme of things. It's better, I think, to get them playing, first, than with sticking them in the slow "read a bunch of documentation" line. They just want to ride the roller coaster that is the new game that they have found. They aren't really interested in reading the technical manual for the roller coaster.

What they come for is the experience of playing the game, not for the experience of being bored to death reading a bunch of dry old text. If they have to read documentation, then keep it sweet, short, and to the point. Otherwise, many will perceive you as being guilty of "wasting their time." This is the Age of Short Attention Spans and the Age of Attenuated Patience. Today's Internet users tend to be impatient with slow-loading websites, and have "grown up" posting short tweets on Twitter-Become-X.

It's not that a game can't offer complexity, these days. many do, in fact. But, again, HOW counts for far more than What.

[Maximus Dominus]

Games that require more players, rather than fewer players, tend to take more time to fill up.

For example, one 12 player game of Alamaze equals:

Two 6-player games of Alamaze.
Three 4-player games of Alamaze.
Four 3-player games of Alamaze.
Six 2-player games of Alamaze.


On game type that Alamze offers on its Game Creator screen is Slugfest (20 Player, No Dispersed, Single Victory).

QUESTION: I am curious, but is 20 the most number of players that any game of Alamaze can hold at the same time?